Julian Assange faces long stay in Ecuador's London embassy … In the covert existence that Julian Assange adopted as founder of the secrecy-busting organization WikiLeaks, he made a lifestyle of sleeping on borrowed sofas and fostering a legend for himself as a man without a place or a country to call home. But now, after Ecuador's decision on Thursday to grant him asylum and Britain's vow to arrest him the moment he steps out of the sanctuary he has found in Ecuador's embassy in London, the Australian-born Assange seems at last to have secured a fixed address. Considering the diplomatic impasse and the vehemence of opinion on both sides, it is one that could be his for months, or even years, if neither Ecuador nor Britain relents. – Economic Times

Dominant Social Theme: This man, this great, blond lion of a man … now he is cornered in an embassy, but yet uncowed. Hear him roar!

Free-Market Analysis: Having pretty much pioneered the idea that Julian Assange is a patsy of a larger power elite directed history, it is incumbent on us logically to continue to make this case or to apologize, but we are not ready to apologize.

It still seems to us this whole affair is being in a sense manipulated at the very top. We checked Google for cites and found there were 30 million for Assange and 20 million for Tony Blair.

This kind of overwhelming saturation simply doesn't happen unless the powers-that-be WANT it to take place, it seems to us. There are plenty of leaked documents in the world and plenty of leakers. But somehow all the attention is on Assange.

Outside of one video that showed US helicopter pilots shooting civilians, we can't think of anything really devastating that's emerged from all this endless angst and infighting. There are certainly leaks that would be of real interest. Why is it that the US has basically destabilized all the secular regimes of the Middle East and given them over to the CIA-penetrated Muslim Brotherhood?

The last time we followed Assange closely, he was running around with a three-year-old list of German tax evaders. He was willing to do anything to keep WikiLeaks relevant. Here's some more from the article:

The address – 3 Hans Crescent – lies in the heart of London's exclusive Knightsbridge district. Barely 50 yards from Assange's safehouse is the men's clothing section of Harrods department store, one of Europe's most expensive places to shop.

But for all its attractions – denied him, in any case, by his confinement to the embassy – it is hardly the sanctuary that Assange would have chosen. In his vision, he has been the matchless pioneer of a movement set to transcend boundaries of nationality, custom and law, using WikiLeaks to tear down walls of secrecy and foster a new era of global transparency and justice.

The word he has used more than any other is free. But the situation in which he finds himself now is akin to a genteel prison, and one without limit of sentence. His quarters come with an air mattress laid on an office floor, and a window to gaze in the direction of London's distant airports, and the possibility they represent of a flight to Ecuador, one of the few countries left where he would be beyond the reach of Interpol.

For now, that flight might as well be a million miles away, given the 20 or 30 Scotland Yard officers keeping a 24-hour vigil outside the embassy. Friends who have visited Assange say he has a computer and a broadband connection, at least one cellphone, and regular deliveries of takeout food, carefully inspected by the police.

Conceivably, Prime Minister David Cameron's government could yet follow through on its warning to Ecuador before the asylum decision that it might invoke an obscure British law that would empower it to suspend the embassy's immunity and send the police in to arrest Assange.

The government has been frustrated by Assange's decision to trump a 20-month legal battle against extradition to Sweden to face questioning on allegations that he sexually abused two young women during a visit to Stockholm in 2010 – allegations he strenuously denies – by fleeing to the embassy. It was a battle he took all the way to Britain's Supreme Court and lost, after running up millions of dollars in mostly unpaid legal fees.

His decision to seek asylum in Ecuador, shortly before he was to have been escorted by the authorities aboard a flight to Sweden, entailed defaulting on a $240,000 bail bond posted by a group of wealthy supporters. He coupled this with a denunciation of the British legal system, which he cast as a corrupted tool of his enemies, the United States principal among them.

Again, we see the narrative presented as it has been throughout the ages. He speaks of the United States as if it were a person, an "enemy," and makes references to the British legal system as if it were an established fact rather than a questionable entity providing tools for thugs and bullies.

And who do they work for? Well, we would argue they work for a globalist power elite that wants to take over the world. The Internet has set back their plans so they have invented all sorts of false flags to confuse people. Assange may be just such a false flag.

Interviews with Assange show him speaking carefully of partners such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Yet these are agencies of the US government and the power elite above it. When he speaks of these publications, he gives them credibility they've long since forfeited on their own.

WikiLeaks was supposed to change the world by making governments transparent. But Assange has ended up with a narrative that focuses on all the weary normalcies of statist memes. There is "Ecuador" And there is "Britain." There are various forms of immunity. Everything has to do with the interactions of nation-states, just as it always has been.

There is nothing enlightening about this process. If anything, it has reinforced the idea that governments are not to be trifled with and that if you stand up to them you'll get into trouble. The rape charges are ludicrous but that's the whole idea, of course. Even nonsensical charges can stick if "they" want to get you.

Assange is giving us a metaphorical lesson about how NOTHING has changed. An object lesson, in other words, of the power of the state. It's hard to believe this in not in a sense premeditated. The article tells us some other disturbing things, specifically that many Assange loyalists have quit over his "highhanded manner."

There are questions over what he has done with donations and why he has announced a shift from being a "nonpartisan dropbox for whistle-blowers to an agency of the political left."

One thing seems certain. The context of the conversation has shifted from WikiLeaks and government malfeasance to Assange himself.

After Thoughts

In Assange's view, what we call the Internet Reformation is all about ASSANGE now. And that's too bad. For more stories on Assange, just do a 'Net search on his name and "Daily Bell."

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